Climate Science Glossary

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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Climate Misinformer: John Christy

Dr. John Christy is a Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He has also been Alabama's State Climatologist since November 2000. He is mostly known for his work with the satellite-based temperature monitoring for which he and Dr. Roy Spencer received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. Christy helped draft and signed the 2003 American Geophysical Union statement on climate change [Source: Wikipedia].

Other professional affiliations: Dr. Christy is listed as a "Roundtable Speaker" for the George C. Marshall Institute, a right-wing conservative think tank on scientific issues and public policy. He is also listed as an expert for the Heartland Institute, a libertarian American public policy think tank [Source: DeSmogBlog]

"The small rate of warming that the planet is going through and the fact that energy production and CO2 might be related to a part of that, there is not much you can do to reverse whatever the climate is going to do whether is man caused or or not."

"you look for a large global number in the heat storage of the atmosphere and ocean and that is rising slowly but it is not rising catastrophically or dramatically and certainly does not point to a high sensitivity of the climate to things like GHGs"

"we do not find trends in these things, not even in heat waves, we do not see heat waves getting worse in the United States, the worst period by far was in the 1930s and the 1920s...snowfall is still falling in the west."

"People who make those kind of claims [urging immediate action] I think are arithmetically challenged, that they don’t sit down and take out the back of an envelope and calculate that when you reduce emissions by X amount what that possibly might mean to the climate, and they will see that these reductions are just not useful. […] To think that you might change the climate, that’s just not on the cards."

"We’re talking about less than a hundredth of a degree [if California cuts emissions by 26% by 2016]. It’s just so minesule; I mean the global temperature changes by more than that from day to day. So this is what we call in Alabama “spitting in the ocean”."

"I would think a couple of things will happen [if Australia cuts its emissions by 5% by 2020]. One is that your energy prices will rise and your economy then will begin to turn downward. And you will provide opportunities for other nations to take up the slack that Australia used to provide the world."

"What we’ve found is that the rate of warming due to carbon dioxide must be pretty small because the Earth is not warming very rapidly. […] I would guess on the order of 1 degree per century. […] I don’t think it’s something to be alarmed at."

"Look at the observations and you will find these weather disasters have always occurred. You will find them in the history at various places at various times. It’s just that we have the ability to record them on camera videophones and put them on YouTube and that’s what makes them so dramatic today, because everyone can see around the world these events that are happening in very localized places."

"Has the temperature of the planet warmed in the past 100 years? And that’s true, it has; it’s warmed a little bit. But remember the climate, or the average temperature of the Earth is never ever static. It is always either going up or going down."

"We look at the temperature of the bulk of the atmosphere, so it’s not confused by what might happen in cities and the countryside and so on at the surface. And by looking at the bulk of the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect is supposed [to] have its greatest effect, we just don’t see much happening at all."

"[the hockey stick] was the icon of the TAR, the Third Assessment Report, and what the tree ring record did, in showing it did not agree with temperatures, indicated that the icon itself, which was based primarily on tree rings prior to the 16th century, was therefore not very good at explaining what the temperature was."

"The hockey stick's author was the same IPCC lead author who in my opinion worked with a small group of cohorts...allowing amputation of a disagreeable result, and the splicing of unrelated data to 'hide the decline'."

"The hockey stick's author was the same IPCC lead author who in my opinion worked with a small group of cohorts and misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1,000 years by promoting his own result"

"IPCC-selected lead authors are given significant control over the text, including the authority to judge their own work against the work of their critics...this process has led to the propagation of incorrect and misleading information in the assessments, and thus should lead you to question the IPCC's general support for a catastrophic view of climate change."

"sea level is rising and will continue to rise because we're in an interglacial. There is still more land ice to melt. So as I always tell our folks down on the coast, be prepared for the fact that sea level is rising about an inch per decade, and I don't see anything stopping it until the next ice age comes."

"This is the 1988 predictions by James Hansen...here's what really happened in the world [shows UAH and RSS lower troposphere temperature data]. And you see that even the actual temperatures fell far below even the scenario that didn't happen (Hansen Scenario C)."

"There's been a lot of articles recently and scrutiny about climate work because of some released emails from East Anglia University in England...scientists can be devious and they can act pretty much like anybody...science is supposed to be open, transparent and so on. That hasn't really been the case in some of the cases here recently."